Zweeko does not exist any more. Good thing we ditched their sorry asses. I’ll bet they fucked over all their clients, too. They were far more interested in MONEY than SERVICE. Good riddance!
TWO UPDATES at end of this post. Our opinion of Zweeko has declined precipitously. :(
We are done with WiredTree. You are reading this from our new server at zweeko.com in the UK!
I’m really shocked at the behaviour of WiredTree, our host for about four years. When our sites (this one in particular) started getting hammered by ddos and wp attacks, they did LITERALLY NOTHING about it. They blamed us for the constant outages and basically had the attitude of “it sucks to be you”.
All they could recommend was that we buy more RAM or upgrade our plan: WHICH WE DID. We moved to a more robust SSD plan that cost $15 more than the other plan we were on ($40 -> $55). Today I wake up to a notice about the sites being down (third time THIS WEEK) and they jacked the billing up to $59 without notice.
Really, WiredTree? REALLY? Wow. It’s become a clear pattern that hosting companies are great for about four years, then they get too big to care. I’ve consistently had to find a new host every 4-5 years for this exact reason: support goes to shit. I expect the same from Zweeko and that is OK. I just have to deal with moving every 4-5 years. Whatever.
So a coupla weeks ago I was kvetching on Twitter about the shitty service we were getting from WiredTree, when I got a message from Sal at Zweeko.com. He enquired about what was going on and offered to bail us out of WiredTree. After much discussion, we decided that we’d give them a go. Sal even called me from London to chat about what they could offer us and that they’d do all the grunt work of moving the sites. As we were chatting, he told me that he and his staff were “having a laugh” about how shitty WiredTree is being to us and that sealed the deal for me. You know what? WiredTree IS being shitty to us. They offer no protection from ddos or wp attacks. There are plenty of server side firewalls available, but they can’t be bothered. Sal uses CloudFlare to protect the servers from attacks and doesn’t even charge extra for it – it’s included in the $70/mo hosting package. WiredTree did suggest that maybe WE should look into CloudFlare for our server, but they can’t be bothered. Assholes.
So the upshot is that we are in the process of moving to Zweeko and WiredTree can suck it. I doubt they’ll even refund the jacked up fee they just charged me and I don’t really give a shit. KEEP IT. Clearly you need it worse than I do (maybe use it for some better support people?). Assholes. [They did not refund anything. Assholes.]
We’ll have plenty of protection from various attacks and we’re adding SSL for $18/yr for further protection. WiredTree wanted $60 for an SSL certificate. Assholes.
UPDATE Feb 2016:
While Zweeko has been better than Wiredtree, we have had plenty of issues. We had several hours of downtime over the end of 2015 – mostly due to growing pains for Zweeko. They had hardware issues and support issues. Sal was a champ through my endless grousing and bitching. Once they got moved to their new data center, however, the problems seem to have planed out. Overall, we are happy with Zweeko after six months. Cloudflare has stopped all the attacks on our sites and buying the certificate has turned out to be a great thing since Google has decreed that all sites must have a certificate or be labeled “unsafe”.
UPDATE #2 June 2016:
Sadly, Zweeko has gone to shit VERY quickly. Less than a year. :( It’s mainly due to the owner abandoning the business to the support team, who are simply not that capable. They are fine with written instructions (the manual), but they cannot THINK outside that and actually FIX issues. All they know how to do is reboot the server, blame us or delete an error log. That’s it. Our sites were down for NINE HOURS Sunday June 4 to Monday June 5 and they didn’t even bother to fix the server until Monday morning. So I guess 24/7 support has been discontinued. The night shift had no idea what the issue was, so they just left it for the day shift. NICE. All the day person did was reboot the server and call it a success.
There is only so much bullshit “Well, so what, it was down for 9 hours! But now it’s UP! Yay! No worries!” attitude I can take. They really DGAF if our sites are down. I reamed them on their fucking FB site and Twitter and we are looking for a new host. Fortunately, I have a buddy who used to work for Zweeko, who can still access my server (hey-o zweeko has shitty security too!) and he went in and fixed a few of the server side problems that the Zweeko staff simply could not figure out. This guy also recommends a host called Kualo, which is at the top of our potential relocation list.
UPDATED
We are culling our sites – taking down the defunct comic sites and making them redirect to indigodragon.net – and we’ll be moving probably before the end of the year. Make that immediately. The absent owner of Zweeko, the one who always says “no worries!!” when something goes wrong, booted us off the server. He threatened to delete all our sites if we were not gone in 48 hours. (Which is why they no longer exist, no doubt. What an ASSHOLE.)
OVERALL REC:
DO NOT USE ZWEEKO. The owner is crazy and very, very unconcerned about the business and clients. He is retaliatory and will screw you over. We are on SITEGROUND now, which has been a big improvement. Our sites are still fucked up with bot attacks, but we are getting them under control. When we are attacked, the server is typically down for only a few minutes rather than HOURS.